Alan Zweibel

Born in Brooklyn, NY, Zweibel lived in the Long Island suburbs where his father raised his family while working as a jewelry manufacturer in Manhattan. He attended the University of Buffalo, where he was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa fraternity before graduating in 1972. Inspired to be a comedy writer by watching "The Dick Van Dyke Show," Zweibel sold jokes and one-liners for seven dollars a pop to comedians along the Catskill circuit and even to the likes of Steve Martin, Rodney Dangerfield, Freddie Prinze and Alan King. In 1973, he began performing stand-up comedy and met producer Lorne Michaels at the Catch a Rising Star comedy club in New York, where he showed him his portfolio of jokes. Zweibel was soon hired as one of the original writers on Michaels' fledgling late night comedy sketch show, "Saturday Night Live" (NBC, 1975-), where he quickly became the go-to writer for some of the show's most famous characters and bits.One of Zweibel's more famous sketches was John Belushi's Samurai, which the comedian based in large part on Toshiro Mifune's performances in Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo" (1961) and "Sanjuro" (1962). Based on the idea by writer Tom Schiller of placing the character in various mundane professions, Zweibel began scripting the series with the second installment, "Samurai Delicatessen," where Belushi's samurai sliced meats and sandwiches with his sword while carrying on pleasant conversations with his customers. Zweibel went on to pen such gems as "Samurai Tailor," "Samurai Divorce Court" and "Samurai Psychiatrist." Meanwhile, he forged a strong personal and professional collaboration with Gilda Radner, taking over the Tom Davis-created character of Emily Litella, a sweetly befuddled elderly woman who delivered opposing opinions on various issues during the show's popular segment, "Weekend Update." His fruitful collaboration with Radner produced another viewer favorite, the vulgar, frizzy-haired correspondent Roseanne Roseannadanna, who delivered brash and often tactless commentaries on the same "Weekend Update" segment. Zweibel also wrote for Garrett Morris' popular Chico Escuela character, a retired Dominican baseball player who spoke broken English.After making his feature debut as a writer for the concert film "Gilda Live" (1980) and suffering from writer's block during season four, Zweibel left "SNL" after the notorious fifth season, which was the last to feature any of the original cast or Lorne Michaels at the helm. He went on to publish his first novel, North (1983), before joining much of the old "SNL" behind-the-scenes staff to work on Michaels' ill-fated variety series "The New Show" (NBC, 1984). Vowing in 1985 to never work with Michaels again, he produced the off-Broadway play "Between Cars" (1986), before joining forces with quirky comic Gary Shandling to create, produce, and write "It's Garry Shandling's Show" (Showtime, 1986-1990), which featured Shandling as a neurotic, self-obsessed comedian who happens to be aware that he is on a television sitcom by often breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to the audience. The show featured a wide variety of guest stars, but nobody more notable than Gilda Radner, who appeared in 1988 while in the midst of battling the ovarian cancer that would eventually kill her the following year.During this period, Zweibel also co-wrote the successful feature version of the classic TV cop series "Dragnet" (1987) starring Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks. He continued to work as a creator, producer and writer in TV comedy with "Good Sports" (CBS, 1991), a winning romantic comedy series about mismatched co-anchors (Ryan O'Neal, Farrah Fawcett), and created the short-lived sitcom "The Boys" (CBS, 1993), about a failing men's club. Ten years after publishing his first novel, Zweibel was hired by director Rob Reiner to adapt the big screen version of "North" (1994), a surreal comedy that featured a young Elijah Wood as an underappreciated child who divorces his parents (Jason Alexander and Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and goes off in search of new ones. Despite boasting some stellar talent in front of and behind the camera, "North" (1994) was a commercial bomb and was met with scathing critical derision, particularly from Roger Ebert who wrote that he " hated, hated, hated, hated this movie." In many eyes, "North" ranked high on the list of being of the worst movies ever made.Years after the tragic death of his friend Gilda Radner, Zweibel published the best-selling memoir of their platonic relationship, Bunny, Bunny: Gilda Radner - A Sort of Love Story (1994), which was transformed into an off-Broadway play in 1997. Meanwhile, he wrote and produced another critically derided film, "The Story of Us" (1999), a romantic comedy starring Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer as a married couple of 15 years. After serving as a consulting producer on the second season of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (HBO, 2000-), Zweibel was both a writer and consultant on a number of small screen specials, including "The 56th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards" (ABC, 2005), "Billy Crystal: The Mark Twain Prize" (PBS, 2007), "George Carlin: The Mark Twain Prize" (PBS, 2009), and "Inside Comedy" (Showtime, 2012), where David Steinberg interviewed other famous comedians about their careers.By Shawn Dwyer